Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.

Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what characters do to each other.

Revenge was a very wild kind of justice.

Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.

... artists were intended to be an ornament to society. As a society in themselves they are unthinkable.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.